Above, Kallop installed The Melody of Structures in the Tremaine Art Gallery last November as art students watched. Opposite page: Top photo, a drawing from Kallop’s sketchbook. Lower photo, Emma Franklin ’17 at Fairfield Farm fashioned a branch into a tool to create an ink drawing.
The weight of the sand turned the vessels into pendulums, which, once unsealed, released a stream of sand to form delicate concentric circles on the gallery floor. At the end of her performance, Kallop stood at one end of the gallery, her hands on her waist, overlooking a sea of intersecting elliptical spirals covering the floor. Student and faculty members seated around the gallery perimeter were entranced. “It was very meditative, peaceful,” said upper mid Ian Duncan. “While she was in the process of making the piece, it seemed very random, but by the end, you could tell that there was a distinct method.” Kallop’s method is part mathematical, part mystical. The Melody of Structures created a “mind space,” a contemplative place in which the audience is transported wherever their imagination might take them. But it was also a reflection on how math and science can blend harmoniously with art and movement. Long before she realized she was an artist, Kallop was intrigued by the connection between the fields of math and science and the world of art.
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At Hotchkiss, she remembered feeling a sense of satisfaction after solving a particularly difficult algebra equation. Years later, she felt the same gratification while applying complex formulas, like the theory of gravity, in her art. This winter, Kallop helped art and ceramics students understand the inherent beauty in math and science — first with her installation in the Tremaine Art Gallery in November, followed by workshops in which she encouraged students to use new techniques and mediums in their work. “I always felt there was an artfulness in math that was particularly appealing to me,” she said. “And there’s this long, rich history of math and science and art. Pythagoras and Plato both believed that math and music had an inherent connection, and during the Renaissance, artists were obsessed with the Golden Ratio of balance and proportion, reflected in the work of Michelangelo and many others. As a visual artist, I’ve always loved the forms and patterns created by equations and formulas, but also that they’re grounded in math and science.” Becoming an artist was not on Kallop’s
radar when she was growing up in New York City. Her father was president of a towing and transportation company, which operated tugboats and ferries in New York and Connecticut, and her mother worked in real estate. But they instilled in her an appreciation for the arts, making regular trips to the ballet, the theater, and museums. “We lived literally around the corner from the Met,” she said, “and I spent a ton of time there as a child. I used to wander around the American Wing, and I loved the works by The Hudson River School, in particular a painting of a rainbow, The Aegean Sea, by Frederic Church.” She often stood, transfixed, staring at that painting. In those moments, she discovered there was something truly magical in the way art could take her to another time and place. Art and math first started to meld together at home, where she spent countless hours playing with a Spirograph, creating intricate, intersecting circular geometric designs that would figure into her own work years later. And, in fact, she keeps the same Spirograph set she had as a child in her studio. While at Hotchkiss, Kallop took classes in